Being Human in an Inhumane Country
A prescient post from my 2023 archives
I wrote this on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2023 and ran across it this week. I thought I’d post it here now with a few edits and updates rather than wait for October 13, 2025. I remain uncertain where we will be in four months. Heads up, this post carries more weight and darkness than I usually share. I do have feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness and those feelings deserve expression too.
It’s October 9, 2023. Indigenous Peoples Day.
Something is not right.
And it’s not just that people are still calling this day Columbus Day.
Most governmental agencies are shut—federal agencies, state agencies, banks, the post office. As a child of the 70s, this feels like an excuse to have an extra holiday for some, but not for ‘essential workers’—that condescending phrase we coined during COVID to label the people who risked their lives and their health because they needed a paycheck. Such patronizing bullshit designed to make exploitation sound noble.
It’s been just eight days since the threat of a government shutdown ended.
The workers are working. I don’t see many businesses with closed doors. Grocery stores, retail stores, gas stations, restaurants, hospitals. It’s not their fault. They have to do their ‘essential work’ in order to pay the bills.
There is a strike just up the road from my house. The 75,000 health care workers from Kaiser Permanente in Oregon, Washington, and California could only strike for three days under federal rules. Today they are starting up again. Day 3. In the rain.
This strikes me as people with money and power controlling the people without. This is what late-stage capitalism looks like. I wonder where we will be in the next few years.
I watch the strikers walk around in the rain for hours holding up signs asking to be paid a fair wage. They must be exhausted. I think that is the point. Exhaust them so that they will finally agree to a smaller amount.
I watch the workers continue to show up at their jobs day after day being paid wages that can’t support a place to live and food and and transportation and medical insurance…let alone kids. So many of them, myself included, have more than one job to minimally support households and pay taxes at a rate much higher than the 1%.
I drive by all of these homeless camps in my city. I can’t help but be reminded that my brother is houseless. I don’t even know where to begin to help with this.
I watch the government turn on a dime after weeks of threatening to take away services like Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP and then say: “Never mind, we’ll just keep paying ourselves at the rate we currently have.”
I watch myself. A cis, white, woman bringing this up on Indigenous Peoples Day. Who am I to be talking about this? How am I using my privilege to help? There are so many issues to focus on. I don’t even know where to begin or how to support.
What I do know is that we are not alright. We are not healthy. We are acting as if it is normal for people to work so hard and never get traction. We are behaving as if social services are optional. We are devaluing human lives as if some people's existence on this planet is only necessary if their bodies are making money for the wealthy few.
What I do know is:
A strike that is regulated is not a revolution.
A government that gets to decide whether or not to shut down and how much they get to pay themselves does not care about the person on the streets or the person working multiple jobs.
My heart hurts that I live in a country that believes that money and status are more important than people.
I don’t have any solutions. This is just a moment of awareness. Maybe someone more educated or involved or (fill in the blank)…. than I can let me know what next steps could be.
I don’t want to live with this on my head anymore during the short time I have on this planet.
UPDATE as I sit here today on June 20, 2025—one day after Juneteenth.
I still don’t have any solutions and I am far more concerned now than I was two years ago about our country. Much of what I feared then has come to pass. The wealth gap has only widened. The ‘essential workers’ are still working—many at multiple jobs just to survive, while billionaires compete to see who can hoard the most resources. My brother is still houseless, and the camps in my city are bigger and more wide-spread.
Those fears seem quaint now when I look at the insanity we are witnessing today. ICE raids are rampant—they have a quota 3,000 people arrested each day and Democratic cities are targeted. People without criminal records are being plucked off of the streets and sent to detention centers. Trump is using six-million of our tax dollars to pay El Salvador to imprison alleged Venezuelan gang members and he defied a judges order to turn the plane around before they arrived in Central America. The National Guard was deployed to LA against the will of the state of California and now an appeals court says Trump and his band of bullies are allowed to stay there.
While all of this is happening to people of color in our country, the attack on trans people continues with the recent Supreme Court ruling in Tennessee allowing states to ban gender-affirming care for minors.
“The immediate outcome is that it doesn’t change anything,” said Kellan Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at Whitman-Walker, a Washington-based nonprofit. “It doesn’t affect the availability or legality of care in states that do not have bans, and it simply says that states that have decided to ban this care can do so if they survive other challenges.”1
We all know how that goes: “Don’t worry about it right now. Nothing is changed. All of you blue states, just take a breath, we’re not coming for you and your trans citizens.”
You better believe they are. They are coming for all of us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Trump and his cronies plan to do to marginalize, abuse, and attempt to erase trans people. The frog is sitting in the water once again and the heat is slowly rising. Will that frog notice before he’s boiling to death?2
And then there’s Gaza and Iran…
What terrifies me most is how quickly we've normalized the abnormal—and each horror becomes just another headline in an endless scroll of outrage. We're living in the slow-motion collapse I could sense coming in 2023—and even well before that in 2020 when I told my partners at the time that I sensed we were headed for 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale if Trump was elected. They told me I was being hyperbolic. I was not.3 It is happening and it is so incremental that we keep adjusting our baseline for what's acceptable.
I’m proud of the fact that the 2,000-plus No Kings protests brought out around five million people. That gives me hope. But, where do we take it from here? How do we stop this lawless administration when they don’t care at all about the Constitution, rule of law, or even morality? They just want to push the boundaries like a petulant teenager trying to see how far they can go before they are stopped.4
I also know have to find my joy and live my life, just like everyone else. How do we hold both the need to fight back and the need for personal peace as true?
The water's boiling now. Time to jump. How are we going to do it?
Taken from The Hill article
I realize actual frogs will jump out of the water before it boils. Apparently, we humans will just let things amp up slowly and let insanity normalize until we are shocked at the place we find ourselves in. Maybe we should try and behave more like frogs.
They are no longer my partners.
As a petulant teenager myself many years ago, I got pretty far and was almost never stopped! So, that thought scares me.
I don't know if you realize you did this. "This strikes me as people with money and power controlling the people without." WRiting about strikes, you use the phrase "This strikes me..."
and it really really works.